1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of accessing information online. More specifically, the invention relates to providing access to information providers online.
2. Background of the Invention
Information providers, such as therapists, computer technicians, tax advisors, etc., have increasingly been delivering their services through the Internet and telephone. Information providers can advertise their services online for viewing by Internet users. In addition, users can search for information providers with conventional search engines.
Once the user finds a desired information provider and selects the information provider, the user can contact that person for services delivered immediately through the Internet or telephone. For example, a customer selects a therapist from a list of therapists displayed online. The selected therapist is offering an instant consultation fee of $1 per minute or $50 for a full one-hour session. The therapist's advertisement displays an indicator of real-time availability—such as a green light—that indicates that this therapist is ready to perform the consultation at the present time. The customer can contact the therapist by clicking an on-screen button that initiates a telephone call or video chat session. The customer can then receive the consultation and pay the therapist automatically online.
In such an online system, the information provider signals to the customer when the information provider is ready to deliver services. Otherwise, a customer may initiate contact while the therapist is not available. The information provider manages the online indicator of his/her availability, informing the system when he/she is ready to communicate with customers. For example, when the therapist is out to lunch, he/she uses the online system to change the availability indicator from green to red, informing everyone that this information provider is no longer available at the present time.
Search engines typically provide advertisers with the ability to place advertisements according to specific keywords. A seller of antique vases, for instance, will pay the search engine to display his/her advertisement when a customer searches on the keyword “vases.” In order to sell keyword advertising most efficiently, search engines will typically use a bidding system, in which advertisers bid in order to have their advertisements appear more prominently, or higher in an ordered list, than competing advertisers. Other bidding systems take into account the popularity of certain advertisers among customers, and factor in this popularity as well as bid amounts into the ranking of advertisers.
These bidding systems, however, fail when it comes to displaying information providers rather than advertisements for objects or web sites. This is because information providers are human and are not always available to provide services—they may be busy with another customer or out to lunch. If a search engine were to use a typical bidding system in order to display information providers, the top bidders, and therefore the top service advertisements, are likely to be unavailable information providers. This would be a dead-end result for the customer.
Therefore, a need exists for a combination of a bidding mechanism and an additional criteria to determine the order that information provider advertisements are to be displayed.